Online friends
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@l-b-heuschkel I think that depends on the person. Personally, I'm almost always blindsided, online or rl. However I know plenty of good judges of character here(online) and IRL who are strongly solid and practical and won't take any shit and seem to be able to smell it a mile away.
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Yes, but, I'd sort online friends into two groups- real friends and acquaintances.
Real friends I care about them beyond the game itself. When they or I leave a sphere we keep talking to one another. I keep caring about them. I want to send them a message and keep up the connection. Acquaintances are those where if the game connection ends, so does the 'friendship'.
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First..."friends" is a subjective term. To those who rely on deep, in-person contact it's not likely that they would describe online friends as actual friends, but to the person with mostly online friends they find those relationships to be qualifying friendships. So...po-tay-toe, po-tah-to.
Myself being a person with a good number of in-person friendships and having been a player in the MU community for years, I can say that I wouldn't describe many of my "Mu community friendships as actual friendships.
I can only think of a small number of times where crossing from text to voice wasn't an absolute nightmare. I think most "MU friends" are best described as "Acquaintances who symbiotically need each other's presence to validate their hobby and online social life who want to keep rules on how and when the acquaintanceship crosses over into the real world; they will likely not follow you to the real world should you choose to leave the hobby."
Just being frank, here. While a number of the people in the hobby are friendly with each other, be it to gossip or roleplay or TS or to assume mutual defense to keep creepers or shitty roleplayers out...the vast majority of them wouldn't drive chicken soup to your house if you were on your deathbed. The majority will not want you to have access to their home, spouses, or children. The people here are predominantly strangers to each other and while there are exclusions to every concept...the "friendship" boundary is placed on involvement in the hobby.
Which, to me, is not a friendship.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@ghost said in Online friends:
The majority will not want you to have access to their home, spouses, or children.
To be fair, I don't want many of the people I know to have access to my home, spouse, or children, including people I consider my friends.
We all get to set our own boundaries.
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I am not real, nor do I have friends
But I am real friendly. -
(cancels her trip to come visit)
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There are friends I have in real life that know only a fraction of who I am as a person, and there are people online who have reached the entire iceberg. It varies, obviously, but I have online friends who have actively checked on me and cared about me more than friends I've had for my entire life. Friends who have endured my whining and anxieties, and questionable elitist takes on anime, yet still want to actually speak to me. Why these people exist is a mystery to me, but I am quite pleased for it all the same.
So, yeah. I'm firmly in the 'They are real' camp.
The most terrifying thing in the world with online friends is when they stop connecting, and you don't know why.
...and then they reconnect like a week later having just loved their vacation, and you feel like a dip for worrying but it was just really out of character for them to not log on at all like that okay.
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@arkandel said in Online friends:
Are online friends real friends?
...this feels like such a weirdly 1990s question to me. Like any minute someone is next going to ask how I know they're not secretly axe murderers. (Why was it always 'axe murderer'? That's practically the least likely type of awful person they might've turned out to be.)
Yes. My online friends are real friends, just like the couple people from Kindergarten I still talk to. They don't live anywhere near me anymore, so I don't see them in person either. We're still friends. Most of my friends within visiting distance now I met online first, with the exception of one from junior high and one I met through her who SHE met first online.
Welcome to the 21st century; most people don't live where they grew up and most people have friends who would happily bring them soup if they lived close enough but can't, whether they originally met playing games on the playground or the internet.
Is everyone I talk to online a genuine friend? No. Do friendships drift? Yes. Is this any different than with people whose breath I can occasionally smell? No. It's just harder to give them a hug. Or a mint.
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@ninjakitten said in Online friends:
@arkandel said in Online friends:
Are online friends real friends?
...this feels like such a weirdly 1990s question to me.
A/S/L(?)
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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Also, yeah. Most of my closest friends for the past, I dunno, twenty years have been online.
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@ninjakitten said in Online friends:
how I know they're not secretly axe murderers. (Why was it always 'axe murderer [in the 90s]'?
I have no idea why
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Lord - I remember being a naive 16 year old answering that question... I was so... not at all aware of life.
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Online friends can absolutely be or become RL friends.
I've traveled cross country to go to the wedding of another, and on another occasion to the same place to visit with a different set of friends for a weekend of fun.
Five came to my wedding. One of them caught the garter, another caught the bouquet.
(I mean, we might have orchestrated part of that, since they were dating. My husband threw the garter at the other after we saw their SO caught the bouquet.)
But, yes. Many of my online friendships are some of my most cherished, as we were also able to meet in RL in safe circumstances and create more memorable memories together.
We're still spread out across the states, but I cherish each and every one of them.
In fact, that same couple just sent me a rather unexpected, but appreciated, gift and we haven't seen each other since they came to my husband's funeral a couple of years ago.
It's all about what you put out into the world and the connections you forge.
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@ninjakitten said in Online friends:
most people have friends who would happily bring them soup if they lived close enough but can't, whether they originally met playing games on the playground or the internet.
Is everyone I talk to online a genuine friend? No. Do friendships drift? Yes. Is this any different than with people whose breath I can occasionally smell? No. It's just harder to give them a hug. Or a mint.
Sometimes would they is less important than can they, is my point.
I love fantasy, but I don't want it to supplant the reality of what I have and what I need.
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@kestrel I mean, that's fine, but the fact that my friend moved 1000 miles away doesn't make them any less my friend. My parents and sibling aren't close enough to bring me soup either, and it doesn't make them less my family. The fact that person X has never as yet lived close enough to bring soup does not mean they're not a real friend.
No one asked 'do you want to know people close by enough to do things like bring soup who are also inclined to if you need it'. The question was 'are online friends real friends'.
The answer is yes.
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Actually, you can bring your online friends soup. Sort of. I have ordered delivery food online for friends 1.5k miles away.
"... you'll find the story doesn’t end how you think, and the most important characters aren’t who you expect.” - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 ‘The Side Effect’
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Hell yes I will send food if someone asked me to.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@ganymede The entertainment factor is increased if you do it when they don't ask, but when they say something like, "I'm so hungry but there's nothing in the house/I am too sick to cook/I can't decide what to cook, much less muster the energy to do it," and don't tell them you did it until after it arrives.
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@il-volpe A good friend online once ubereats an amazing bowl of waffles and icecream when I was having a hard time. So definitely is a thing.
